The end of vulnerabilities. Alternating between Python and Ruby; R&D, Consulting, and Ops; Linux and BSD. Moving from Austin to Skokie to Baltimore. Adoptive to Bio. Republican to Democrat, and other Things Done Backwards

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Comparing various OpenBSD sysctl hw dumps (real and virtual)

I'm even less capable of anything insightful tonight than normal (daughter still sick, Vicks fumes making me nauseous--or perhaps it was finally watching Borat tonight--not sure which scene was more more amazing: the "motel fight," proposing to Pamela Anderson or, speaking in tongues, although the bear scaring the children from the ice cream truck was fun, too), but needed to get something technical on the top blog.

To clear my head, did a quick pre-OpenBSD 4.1 install just now (nothing more pleasantly mind-numbering than OS installs and yes, there was a branch this week) on VMWare Fusion which has been rock solid with XP, 2K, Ubuntu, and even OpenBSD. Yeah, who needs this fancy Parallels crap.... Coherence... Whatever...

Oh and while I'm ranting... I certainly think outing OpenBSD bugs is fun (ah the sweet naivety of my first year in STAT, posting from from Cisco account and I didn't even get a nasty note from Jim Duncan) I think Bejtlich is off the mark on his "preview" IPv6 stack issues, 2007 is not going to be 1997. Codenomicon has had their IPv6 suite for ages and all the big boys have sent their Euros east and have been silently fixing "obscure" IPv6 bugs for years now.

Since the hardware info provided by sysctl has been of interest lately (for inventory control purposes) I thought I'd make some comparisons:

So the trend is definitely toward more CPU information (and at least on one of my Optiplex's at work, the hw.serialno field actually matches one of those Dell stickers on the box) don't know if this is the case for other vendors as well.